Swearing with Mary

When I was 12 I looked about 7

When I was about twelve, I belonged to a gang of boys called 'The Boys'; there were no girls allowed, except for one who was called Mary, or Big Bum. She was bigger than all of us boys, and when she spotted us having a meeting, she came along and joined us on my Mom’s front step, uninvited, and no one could think of a way of stopping her since she was taller and stronger than all of us. Desmond suggested that we could let her in to the gang properly, even though she was a girl, but only if she could share a new swear word. We then reminded ourselves of the swear words that we already knew. They included 'bloody', 'hell', 'sod', 'shit' and 'bugger'. Of course we didn’t know what all of them of them meant, but we did know that if we used them in front of adults, we would get a smack on the head, or maybe ‘the belt’.

So there we were sitting on the step dying for a smoke, when who should come running down the street but Mary, all out of breath.  Plonking herself between Fred and Henry she moved her hips suddenly sideways and knocked Fred right off the step.

Then Mary said, ‘So what are we going to do today?’ as though she was a member of the gang.

A gang of 'tough boys' like me.

‘Well,’ said Desmond, ‘we’ve just made up a new rule  - you can’t belong to the gang until you bring in a new swear word, and it must be one that we haven’t got’.

‘What swear words have you already got?’ said Mary.

So we told her the ones that we knew. Mary said they were pissy swear words and she had a much better one. None of us mentioned to Mary that we hadn’t thought of ‘pissy’ as a swear word, and waited eagerly for the new word, which might be even better

‘Fuck!‘ she said with an evil glint in her eyes.

‘What kind of a word is that, Big Bum?’ said Fred. ‘I’ve never heard it before.’

‘I have,’ said Henry. ‘I heard my Dad tell our cat to fuck off once.’

So we agreed to let Mary into the gang. And then find someone who could tell us what the word meant.

Well, you might think that was the end of the story, but no. On Sundays I had to have dinner at home with my family in Preston Road. I usually stayed all day with my Gran ‘cause she loved me the best of all my cousins  - girls and boys - which I thought was perfectly natural. Any road up, that Sunday I came home for dinner and there we were round the table, and I dropped my fork on the floor, and said, 'Oh fuck.’

Dad lurched up and came running around the table and I thought he was going to kill me. So I headed for the door and ran all the way back to Gran’s house, with Dad chasing me. When we both got there I hid behind Gran’s long skirt.

She said to my Dad, ‘If you touch this child, you and I are going to fall out.’

So Dad backed off and went home. I was a bit miffed at being called a child, but grateful nonetheless. So I made up my mind to definitely ask Big Bum what fuck meant; I obviously didn’t know what I was dealing with.  Learning to swear with a gang of ‘tough’ boys and a girl was going to be more serious than I thought .

Putting a Bet On

Every day except Sunday, Dad would walk from Preston Road to the factory where he worked, now he was out of the Royal Engineers and back at work, in Warstone Lane in Hockley. On Friday nights and weekends he would drink at the Red House with his brothers, and whenever he had the money, he would bet on the horses.Each working day Mom would give him half a crown for his dinner, but most times he would spend it having a bet on a horse instead. He did his gambling with an illegal bookie whose betting shop was up an entry at the bottom of a road close to the factory where he worked.

A furtive looking man, called Frank, a bookie’s runner, wearing a checked cap and a dirty white silk scarf around his neck, stood at the bottom of the entry. He was constantly watching for the police, his head darting backwards and forwards like a ferret. As an illegal punter, Dad would wrap his money for the bet in a piece of paper and sign with his non de-plume. His signature was always ‘Bonnie’; no one knew why, but Auntie Chris said it was an old girlfriend’s name from when he was a young man. Somehow, this gossip had never filtered through to Mom, who would have killed him, because he called my little sister ‘Bonnie’ too, even though her name was Roberta.

A typical 'entry', where the bookie's runner
would furtively wait for punters.

When a punter arrived at the betting shop, off would come the runner’s cap for the bet to be dropped into, then it was immediately slapped back onto his balding head. The attempts at secrecy were quite futile, as was the lookout for the police. All the bookies had an arrangement with the local police, where each gambling establishment was regularly raided on cue. There was an appearance in the local Magistrate’s Court and a predetermined fine was imposed. It worked very well; everybody was satisfied and there was no time wasted. Dad always had accumulator bets; he called them ‘if coming bets.’ He would bet sixpence on a horse, and if it won at 2 to 1, the shilling plus the sixpence went on the next horse, and so on. He rarely won. I would place bets for my Dad regularly. It made me feel quite grown up and daring going up the entry with his half crown rolled up in a piece of paper and putting it in the cap of the ferret-like little man with the grubby white silk scarf. I was always half expecting to feel a policeman’s hand on my shoulder and a voice saying ‘ello, ‘ello, what’s all this ‘ere then son?’ And me answering, ’It’s a fair cop, ossifer’, and being dragged off to the slammer, which I could later brag about to everybody.

Going to Church with Gran

I spent a lot of time with Gran during the war, but always had to go home to Preston Road to sleep. On the wall at Gran’s house there was a black and white ‘lithograph’, that’s what Gran called it, of Great Uncle William who got killed in the Great War, which was called ‘the war to end all wars’. He stood there proudly in the uniform of a private of the South Staffordshire Regiment; on his head was a pillbox hat tilted to one side, and in his hand was a swagger stick. Every year on Armistice Day all the members of the family put a poppy around the frame of the lithograph to remember Gran’s twin brother who died serving his country. Sometimes after church Gran would let me look at Great Uncle William’s medals and the special plaque that soldiers got in the Great War, when they were blown up by the Germans.

Gran and I always went to St Chrysostoms Church of England in Winson Green. The church was in Park Road where Auntie Chris lived; Uncle Edwin was her husband and he was in the army serving in India. Gran said that St Chrysostom’s was opened in 1888 as a mission church and consecrated in 1889 as a real church. I think that a mission church was for poor people; I didn’t know that we were poor, nobody ever told me. It was a rough old church; there was a woodyard opposite and scrap metal yards, and a railway bridge 50 yards away. To complete the picture, weeds covered every spare inch of space. When it was built, in Victorian times, the church would have been the centre of parish life. But even then, Winson Green, which makes you think of a quaint village with a central green and a duck pond, was a dark, dirty industrial area, infested with factories.

St Chrysostom’s Church, which was demolished in 1970

At the church door, I gave out the hymnbooks, mostly to women and young girls. Then I sat down next to Gran and pretended to sing as the organ started to wail. The hymns 'For Those in Peril on the Sea' and 'Onward Christian Soldiers' are indelibly imprinted in my memory. It was at church that my interest in girls gathered momentum, and increased my confusion about my feelings for them. Blonde and brown headed girls giggled a lot outside of St. Chrysostoms. Upon entering the cold gloomy silence of the church, with its dusty battle flags of the First World War hanging from poles on the wall, these chattering girls became almost angelic. Stern penitent mothers admonished their clutches of angels sitting on hard pews, to ‘shush’.

The vicar, who was aided by three young boys in white frocks, also wore what I thought was a lady’s frock, and he had a piece of coloured ribbon around his neck with a large medal dangling from it. I didn't understand anything about what he preached, but I remember that he almost sang his words and I noticed that some of the moms would nod off to sleep. That was when I cast furtive looks at those enraptured girls, as I had looked at Georgina in the playground.

At the end of the service, some of the congregation milled around the arched doorway, while others
pushed through the heavy doors, eager to be the first away to listen to the radio. But it was compulsory to shake the vicar’s hand, which meant that there was a queue and it took some time to get out.

The evening service was a repeat of the morning one, except that only half of the congregation turned up, and worst of all, almost no girls. At the evening service there were no compulsory handshakes with the vicar at the church door, so the congregation disappeared as quickly as soap suds down the sink once the plug had been pulled.

Church over and a slow stroll home, and Gran and I would listen to ‘Grand Hotel' on the BBC Home Service. That was where I was introduced to classical music. I also listened to ITMA - 'It’s That Man Again' featuring Tommy Handley. I didn't understand the jokes, which were topical, some concerning the current war. I was old enough, however, to understand the terror of the nightly bombing.
 

Radio was everyone’s ears to the world. There were many comedy shows and drama series as well as music. I don’t remember hearing Princess Elizabeth on the radio, but she did some encouraging talks for children during the war.